


Pranks and Private Investigators

by Swashbuckler



Category: The Flash (TV 1990), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alliances, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Assumptions, Gen, Guns, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Miscommunication, Mother-Son Relationship, Post-Episode: s04e11 The Elongated Knight Rises, Private Investigators, Supervillains, They get sorted, Trauma, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25223749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swashbuckler/pseuds/Swashbuckler
Summary: Megan Lockhart gets two new clients.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	Pranks and Private Investigators

**Author's Note:**

> As per the tags, this fic does make references to trauma and abuse, so please take that into account when reading. If anyone feels anything else needs to be tagged please let me know!

Megan pressed her knuckles against her temples and willed the aspirin to work faster. Three cases in a row. Three cases in a row she had been required to do the majority of her legwork around the city in the unholy hours of the morning. She ground her palms into her eyes and took a mouthful of coffee from the mug by her computer. It was spat back into its mug with wretched haste; it had gone cold and grainy at least an hour ago. She slammed the mug and its dregs back onto her desk and snapped her laptop shut with it. Megan wiped a hand across her face and dug her fingertips into her temples, squeezing her eyes shut. She was going to have to start setting stricter parameters for her clients’ demands. This was killing her.

The creak of her office door grated against the throbbing in her head. “You’re Megan Lockhart, right?”

“Says so on the door,” she muttered. “I’m not open right now, come back in a couple of hours.” 

“Aww.” It was bemused disappointment, a clear indication that this client was not going to leave in a hurry. She dragged her head out of her hands. The willowy young man stood in her doorway cocked his head to the side, a little smile lingering on his lips. “Are you sure? I think you’re really gonna want the case I’ve got for you.” 

"Am I now." 

"Oh, for sure." The kid had crossed her office and dropped into the chair opposite her with a content noise before she could grumble about him not shutting her door. "I came to you especially." There was a stripe of blonde, freshly bleached, running through the front of his hair, and his eyes were bright and wide as he stared at her, bottom lip caught under his teeth like he was trying not to laugh at some private joke.

Megan sighed, and waved a hand. Fine. _Fine._ She dug a notepad out of her desk drawer and snatched a biro from the pot on her desk. “Right. What can I help you with?”

The kid leant forward in the chair. “I am trying to find my dad,” he said, tapping the fingertips of his left hand in a little rhythm against the edge of her desk. 

Megan nodded. That wasn’t unusual. She’d had a few clients with similar requests before. “What’s the story?” 

“Heeee broke out of prison a while ago and the police can’t find him,” he winced, then giggled. “I kinda don't think they're even looking, which is mad, right?" 

Megan raised an eyebrow. “You’re looking for an escaped convict.” 

“My dad,” the kid nodded. “Anyway, I tried to find him. I thought I’d be able to, y’know - he’s my dad and I know all about him.” The kid picked at the thread fraying at the knee of his jeans, eyes on her desk. He shrugged and sniffed. “I got nothing.” He made a noise like a sigh as he sat up, shaking off the subdued mood that had settled in. “ _Sooo_ , someone recommended I find a particular PI--” he indicated Megan with a little flourish “--and I reckon you could find him way better than we could.” 

“We?” Megan clarified, making notes.

“Me and my mom,” the kid explained. “She was the one who recommended you.”

Megan nodded. _Makes sense._ “This dad of yours,” she asked, “he got a name?”

“James Jesse.” Megan’s pen froze on her page. The young man gave her a coy smile. “I think you’ve met before?” 

_“Who are you?”_ The words were bitten out. If this kid thought he could come in here and play this game, he was going to find out very quickly that he was going to lose. 

The young man looked put off by the question. “They definitely mentioned me on the news. I’m Axel. Axel Walker.” He waits hopefully for a moment of recognition. “The second Trickster. James Jesse is my dad.”

She recognised him now, a face on her TV from years ago. In all his photos he’d been in a mask and a personal homage to Jesse’s garish costume - without then now, in a black hoodie and jeans, he could’ve, should’ve been anyone else - and for all his efforts he’d been a footnote against James Jesse’s name, his accomplice, the one who’d broken him out. Axel Walker has been acknowledged and then lost amongst the fear that had flooded every news station and paper and the fury she had been filled with as she faced down James Jesse for the first time in nearly thirty years through a screen.

James Jesse was _out of prison again--_

They’d never mentioned paternity. They had definitely never mentioned that Jesse’s accomplice had been his son. She would have remembered. Her eyes are flitting all over his face. Dark hair, the eyes, the jaw— nothing matches, there’s nothing, he can’t be— Megan takes a slow breath in through her nose. There is no resemblance. It was fine. It was a trick. It had to be. Jesse always had been good at selling his delusions. There was no sign, no similarity, nothing she could recognise that proved the kid was really his. 

Then Axel smiled. 

“Get. Out.”

“Hey!”

“Get _out_.” The gun from her desk drawer is in her hand faster than she’s ever had it before. 

“Whoa, whoa, hang on!” Axel’s eyes went wide and he had his hands up by his ears in a flash, slumping lower in the chair. “I’m being serious.” 

“So am I.” 

“Would you just--” The hammer of the gun clicked back and Axel Walker’s hands shot up high in the air. “I mean it, please, seriously, it was my mom’s idea to come see you. Mom!” Axel called urgently without taking his eyes off the gun. “Could you come in now, please?” 

The woman in her doorway she recognised immediately, and she wished she didn’t. _Mom. Of course._

Zoey Clark shut the office door behind her. “I won’t pay you if you shoot me,” Zoey Clark chided, words oh-so cheery. “I’ll do far worse if you shoot him,” she warned, her tone still shaped like something friendly. She crossed the office and stood behind Axel, hands resting on the back of his chair. 

Megan’s lip curled, barrel of the gun flicking between the pair of them. “The hell are you doing here, Clark?”

“Axel told you,” Zoey said cheerfully.

“Yeah, like I’m ever gonna do that. Nice move, sending your son in first - figured I wouldn’t be too happy to see you?”

Zoey made a show of shrugging her shoulders, eyes wide. “I wasn’t wrong,” she pouted at the gun pointed at her. 

“Yeah, well,” Megan muttered, “I figured if you ever came to see me you’d have the same idea. Might be coming to ‘get rid of the competition’.”

Zoey looked at her, and Megan saw the flicker of confusion, of pain in her eyes before it disappeared. “I used to want that,” she smiled, stroking her hand over her son’s hair, “didn’t I?” She gave his cheek an affectionate pat. “But now,” she said, her attention bright and sharp again, “I want something new.” 

Megan scoffed. “Your kid said you wanted to find Jesse. How is that new? I’m not gonna help you find that monster just to reunite you. Any of you.” _Any of us,_ she added silently.

Zoey sighed and rolled her eyes. “Not like that, silly,” she tittered. She patted her son’s shoulder. “Boo-boo? Could you--?”Axel was up out of the chair before his mother could finish her question. Megan watched as they revolved around each other, Axel squatting down at his mother’s side, arms folded on the edge of her desk as Zoey sat across from her in the vacated chair. “No,” she smiled, sat tall and proud, hands linked around her knee like she was on a chat show, “we want to find Jesse, so _he_ doesn’t find _us_.”

That she had not been expecting. Megan eyed Zoey suspiciously, then the kid at her side. A brief moment of hesitation, then, slowly, she unlocked her fingers from around the pistol. She swapped it to her right hand, raised it to the ceiling, and clicked the safety back on. On the other side of her desk, the second Trickster let out a relieved noise. 

“Thanks, Megan,” he beamed. 

“Lockhart,” she corrected, bluntly. She sat down in her office chair, gun balanced on her knee, ready and within reach. “So. Talk.” 

“You’re not surprised?” 

“Oh, I am, that’s why I want an explanation,” Megan said seriously. “Since when did you fall out of love with him?” 

Zoey’s focus slipped from her face again. “Oh, it’s been a long time,” she said, rubbing her neck absently. “All of that was ...such a long time ago.”

“And yet it feels like yesterday,” Megan murmured. “Never could shake that feeling.”

Zoey nodded. “A lot has changed since then. For the better, I think.” She sucked a breath in through her teeth. “Did you know James broke out of Iron Heights last year?” 

There was ice in her chest. “Your kid mentioned it.” _No. No, I did not._

“It’s okay,” Axel chimed in. “Nobody does. I think the Warden hushed it up.”

“It is just so embarrassing when people break out of Iron Heights,” Zoey said in hushed tones, only for it to break into giggles she shared with her son. “They’re slacking,” she mouthed to Megan. 

“It’s shameful,” Axel agreed in a whisper. 

Megan took a steadying breath in through her nose and pointed to Axel. “You said you didn’t think they were looking for him. Why?” 

Axel shrugged, shoulders bobbing to his ears as he dropped his chin onto his crossed arms. “I overheard the guards talking - something about a bigger Metahuman problem the Warden wanted them to focus on. I think he’s got some kinda grudge.” 

Megan considered this. She didn’t know enough about Iron Heights to be able to refute it. It could be true. Or all this could be a trap. 

The perfect trick. One she would willingly fall for. 

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asked. “Having you here wanting rid of Jesse sounds too good to be true. This could be a trick.” 

“Now, that would be a good trick - a fantastic bait and switch,” Zoey agreed. “But not a trick James could get me to agree to.”

“Really.”

Zoey burst out laughing. “Of course not! If I still loved him and wanted to get back to him, do you think I would dangle his _favourite_ in front of him in the process?” she asked snidely, and Megan could hear the ghost of the jealousy she had known, but that was all it was. In the place of a blaze, there was doused kindling; the remains of a fire put out long ago. “And it’s not like I would agree to ever help him get you back.” 

Megan narrowed her eyes. “Not even if he wanted to kill me?” 

There it was again, that distant look in Zoey’s eyes. The confusion, the pain, the briefest flash of fury--

“Especially not then.” 

Megan could tell when she was being lied to. She had made a profession of it amidst her career, finding clients who aren’t telling her the whole truth, neighbours and friends who are trying to mislead her. 

Zoey was not lying.

“So why now?” Megan asked, taking the notebook she’d started making notes in for the kid and tearing the pages out of their spiral binding. This case wouldn’t need a record.

Zoey beamed. “Well,” she explained, voice adopting that playful edge again. “Before Axel and I got locked up, we might’ve made a teeny, _tiny_ bit of very public noise in Central.” 

Megan frowned. “You did?” 

Zoey gasped, hand on her chest. “You didn’t see it?” 

“I was in Europe for a couple of months. Must’ve been when you made your comeback.” Damn it, this is why she needed to get Twitter.

“Gah-- Anyway,” Zoey continued, waving away the interruption. “We made quite a scene in Central - hostages, a full stage, the Flash’s friends, the whole shebang. The problem we might run into soon now we’re out of prison again is that James always used to consider Central his city, and, well,” Zoey winced “James never did like sharing his toys.” 

“Tell me about it,” Megan muttered. 

Zoey gave her a tiny, solemn nod. “We’ve had offers of help from some of our _lovely_ new friends,” Zoey continued conspiratorially, sharing a giggle with her son. “But, as wonderfully territorial as they are, they don’t know him like we know him. Like you know him, Megan.” She never thought she’d hear those words coming from Zoey Clark, and definitely never with anything close to respect. “You helped catch him back in his heyday. If anyone can help us find him, it’s you.” 

Megan dropped the notebook back into its drawer, and placed the gun down beside it. “To what end then, if not a reunion?” Megan asked.

“Oh, I can think of a few ends,” Zoey nodded enthusiastically. Megan huffed out a laugh. “Perhaps pushing him out of a moving car for the cops to find. That’d be a good start.” 

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Megan mused. 

“Is that a smile I see?” Zoey coaxed with a knowing look.

Megan shrugged. “Might be.” Just a bit. It was a nice image, after all, but something was still bothering her. She pointed to Axel.

“What about him?” she asked sternly.

“Me?” Axel chirped.

“Mhm. Clark, you--”

“Oh, Zoey, please,” Zoey cut in. “No need for all of that old hostility.” 

“--Zoey,” Megan corrected tentatively. That’d take some time getting used to. “You might’ve fallen out of love with Jesse, but last I heard the kid was his new number one fan.” She turned her attention to Axel. “How do you feel about hunting down daddy-dearest?”

Axel shifted. “I broke him out of prison the first time,” he said, and he sounded so proud of himself; his first prison break, a true triumph. “I did everything right. He said he was proud of me. He said he wanted me to be his legacy.” Axel’s smile wobbled. “He’s broken out twice - twice,” he told her pointedly, “since I was in there with him, after the Flash ruined everything. And he just-- he just left me there.” He was still smiling, a messy, lopsided thing as his eyes shone and his voice cracked. “I don’t get _why._ ” 

“And now you know another reason for me wanting to find James,” Zoey said with a sinister smile. "It's okay, boo-boo, he'll be back rotting in prison before you know it," she crooned to her son as he dashed his hand across his eyes. He nodded and gave a wobbly laugh.

“Now, Megan,” she said, clapping her hands together. “You don’t have to help us. You don’t have to. We’re still going to find him,” Zoey explained, “whether you help us or not, so don’t feel bad about stopping our fun if you do want to say no. It’ll take us longer, of course, but we thought it’d just be rude not to ask first.”

“C’mon,” Axel grinned, bouncing. “Please say yes.”

“We really would love it if you said yes,” Zoey nodded. “I can pay you double, triple, quadruple your usual fee if it would sweeten the deal. What d’you say, Megan?” Zoey asked. “Wanna help _prank_ the Trickster?” 

For the first time all week the pressure in her head had vanished. Megan smiled. “When do we start?” 

Axel grinned. “ _Told_ you you’d want this case.”


End file.
